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Famous Monster Tales
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March 20, 2020
Sadly, our world is so full of up-close-and-personal horrors and real-life monsters that it's obvious we have become somewhat jaded in our response to what used to provoke frissons of terror in our forebears. Ultimately, this collection is a bit disappointing because I can find more terrifying monsters on Instagram or Fox News. The latest school shooting--by now almost The All-American Pastime--is monstrous in its inevitability by now. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were the kids next door, so who could ever possibly be safe from the next domestic monster? I think of Hannah Arendt's brilliant dissection of the Nazis as exemplars of the "banality of evil." And, thanks to the omnipresence of media, we have nowhere to go to escape from its insidious, creeping, banal intrusion.
Back to the book.
I always think of Lovecraft as being able to generate a real enjoyable case of goosebumps, but "The Outsider" is a rather self-indulgent exercise that concludes in bathos, where the monster (oooh, it's the narrator!) ends up wandering through barely post-prehistorical settings with linguistically challenging names like Nyarlothtep. "Smoke Ghost" was probably the best of this bunch, and mainly because it plays on familiar nightmarish tropes like The Thing Is Drawing Ever Nearer and That Person You Think You Know Is Actually Not That Person Anymore. But most of these are, sadly, no match for some of the nasty stuff I can scroll through on my phone every single day.
Back to the book.
I always think of Lovecraft as being able to generate a real enjoyable case of goosebumps, but "The Outsider" is a rather self-indulgent exercise that concludes in bathos, where the monster (oooh, it's the narrator!) ends up wandering through barely post-prehistorical settings with linguistically challenging names like Nyarlothtep. "Smoke Ghost" was probably the best of this bunch, and mainly because it plays on familiar nightmarish tropes like The Thing Is Drawing Ever Nearer and That Person You Think You Know Is Actually Not That Person Anymore. But most of these are, sadly, no match for some of the nasty stuff I can scroll through on my phone every single day.
Displaying 1 of 1 review